It’s absolutely unfair to place all the blame on Orton for the bumbling, fumbling, not-ready-for-prime-time performance of the Broncos during Monday Night Football, when they lost 23-20 to Oakland.

But Orton has lost all credibility with Broncomaniacs.

And John Fox now finds himself in an unusually bad spot after only one loss as the coach in Denver.

The boredom of his medieval, ball-control offense was only exceeded by its ineptitude. Worse, Fox is the guy who’s standing in the way of what the people want: Tim Tebow, America’s favorite back-up quarterback.

We were promised a fresh era of Broncos football, with the legendary John Elway running the front office and the professional demeanor of Fox on the sideline. But the clock struck midnight early on the new regime. The honeymoon is over. There was that all-too-familiar, palpable taste of disgust in the locker room after the loss.

“You always want to start fast, whether it’s in a game or in a season. Period. But you can’t expect to do that if you don’t do things right. We didn’t do a lot of things right. We did more things wrong than anything. And you see the end result: a loss.”

Then, Bailey calmly took a slow measure of how inadequate the Broncos were against Oakland. He refused to blame the coaches. He cited a group of players who inexplicably failed to give proper effort in the season-opener.

“I know we’re going to look at this tape and notice a lot of missed tackles, a lot of missed assignments. That’s just attitude, heart and desire. I don’t think we had enough of that to win this game,” Bailey said. “That’s very disappointing. It (stinks).”

The booing of Orton started early in the fourth quarter, shortly after a 1-yard run by Oakland quarterback Jason Campbell gave the Raiders a touchdown that put them in firm control against a team still trying to recover from the debacle that was the Josh McDaniels era.

The chants for Tebow by a frustrated crowd were first heard with 6 minutes remaining in the game, even as Orton was marching the Broncos toward the end zone in an effort to rally his teammates from a 10-point deficit.

Tebow was in uniform. He looked handsome wearing a Broncos cap on the sideline. But he did not play a down. Guess it would have required imaginative offensive thinking to find any role for him in the game plan.

When asked if he considered making a change at quarterback, Fox ignored the question.

The Tebow Thing, however, is here to stay. There’s no controlling the circus now. Before halftime, angry emailers began consistently punching send with unrelenting criticism of Orton. “OMG!” declared a man named Mo from Palmdale, Calif., in an electronic message to The Post. “Orton is the worst QB in the league!”

Is Fox’s style of play hopelessly outdated? During the featured TV game of the MNF opener, New England quarterback Tom Brady torched Miami for 517 yards passing and four touchdowns. No rookie QB in NFL history has ever come out firing like Carolina’s Cam Newton, who threw for 422 yards in his debut.

Week 1 of the season saw the league set a record for most games with two quarterbacks enjoying 300-yard performances. Can the Broncos or any other team in 2011 seriously compete for a championship with such a conservative offensive philosophy?

Although he passed for 304 yards, Orton finished with a pedestrian QB rating of 71.3 and was also guilty of committing a clumsy, unforgivable fumble in the fourth quarter. “I just feel sick about the ball slipping out of my hands like that,” he said. “It’s just one of those deals. But it’s sickening to have happen to you.”

But it was not Orton’s fault that Oakland’s Darren McFadden gashed the Denver defense for 150 yards on the ground. It was not Orton’s fault that the inexperience of Broncos rookie tackle Orlando Franklin was exposed on an offensive line that did a poor job of protecting its quarterback. It was not Orton’s fault that Knowshon Moreno again looked like a wasted first-round draft choice by McDaniels.

With everything that went up in smoke for the Broncos, replacing Orton at quarterback might be like spray-painting a fire.

But hearts in Denver burn with yearning for Tebow.

Maybe Orton should have found a way to accept that trade to Miami on the eve of training camp, and got out of Denver when the getting was good.

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